December 17, 2015

About two years late to
the party, I decided to finally sit down and have a go at watching Martin
Scorsese’s Wolf of Wall Street (2013). The film is famous for several reasons –
for example, putting Tarantino to shame with its usage of the word “fuck” – but
what most lingers in the memory of viewers is the amount of time devoted in the
film to the conspicuous consumption indulged in by the protagonist of the film
(if you could call him that, God help him) throughout his rise and fall from
glory.

To the credit of the
director and those who wrote the script, Jordan Belfort (the titular “wolf”)
never does seem rational or justified in his abuses of power, and to the
insightful viewer, the most vicious social consequences of capitalism are quite
starkly portrayed in the film. His mentor admits outright that the Wall Street
stockbrokers who live so famously large create nothing, making thousands of
people “rich on paper” while encouraging them again and again never to collect
their earnings. When Jordan Belfort demonstrates to a room of working-class,
boiler-room stockbrokers on Long Island how he can so easily scam a man
struggling to pay his mortgage, the working men flock to Belfort to learn his
technique. In this we can see the way the hyper-individualist, amoral
capitalist system of ethics pits men against one another. (Belfort acknowledges
this and later encourages this ethic to those working under him at Stratton
Oakmont.)

The
problem with the portrayal of conspicuous consumption in Wolf of Wall Street,
however, is that much of the audience, even after seeing Belfort and his
partners suffer and induce suffering again and again as a result of it, would
still envy the excess of Belfort’s life. The scenes in which Belfort begins to
show any sort of self-awareness or regret for his deeds are fleeting and
retrospectively unimportant. They invoke far less emotion than the scenes of
excess: we can feel very clearly how Jordan Belfort masks his own insecurity and
fear of fall by self-aggrandizing (take, for example, how he boasts endlessly
to an FBI investigator who seems to have gotten his better), and we envy it.
His psyche seems so invincible for so long that it becomes the most
recognizable face of the man throughout the film, and there should be no doubt
that many in the audience, given his position, would tell themselves that they,
unlike him, would know how to handle themselves and stay atop the heap. The
“neutral” portrayal of excess in the film ultimately castrates what could
otherwise have been a powerful, well-overdue message to the public about the
fragility of wealth and the men who own it.

What
we can take from the film is this: that the psychology of the rich man is not
much different than that of the poor man. When faced with instability, the rich
man abuses women, intoxicates himself, and becomes hostile to others. Even when
confronted by a man in the right, he will become indignant. He falls for the
same tricks and pays little mind when others of his kind suffer.

Another
important thing to note is that the film underlines the misogyny and racism
that still thrives so blatantly in bourgeois culture: the behaviour of
stockbrokers at Stratton Oakmont could hardly be distinguished from what one
might see in a frat house. For the mere sake of entertainment, they pay their
female assistant to shave her head (similar to an ancient punishment for women
accused of sexual impropriety). Jordan shouts to a jeering audience that she
will spend the money on double-D breast implants. Prostitutes are regularly
marched through the offices to service the male members, and are referred to in
the same terms used to describe the sheets of paper on which the men do their
day work, ranked by apparent “quality”. Do men of colour have any part in this?
Apparently not – aside from the one stockbroker referred to by his friends as a
“depraved Chinaman”, people of colour in this film are reduced to maids and
chauffeurs. Nonetheless, Jordan Belfort, in trying to sell his self-help
program after years of decline in his financial business, tells his audience
that anyone could find his wealth with the right strategy. (As if to drive the
knife further into the back of the working class, he claims several times that
those who find his dog-eat-dog ethic questionable deserve to be “working at
McDonald’s”.)

What should finally be
taken from this? At face value, the movie appears to be an ultimately impotent
show of a rich man getting off easily for a debauched life of exploiting and fleecing
others. It ultimately failed to make a larger message apparent to the public,
but with the right discretion and analysis, it can ultimately be used as a
teaching tool for leftists interested in the unhealthy attitudes propagated by
capitalism.

This article is printed in Issue 19 of Rebel Youth
which is now available! The issue deals has a focus on student struggles and
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